Chapter Eighteen
Ronan
The basement door clicks shut behind us as we slip inside.
The bay doors are sealed tight, and everything inside me turns razor sharp.
We came in through an old employee entrance; the lock easy to pick, abandoned to time and neglect.
This is the point of no return. Kimber and Berk are somewhere above us.
And every second we waste is another second Dean gets to keep breathing.
Rowan moves first, slipping ahead with that fluid, predatory ease he’s always had. Emerson follows, sweeping low with his barrel, methodical and steady. I anchor the back, every sense tuned to movement, sound, breath, danger.
The loading dock yawns wide, a cavern of concrete and rusted steel.
The air tastes of old oil and mold, laced with a metallic tang that sinks into your lungs and refuses to leave.
Three truck bays stretch along the far wall.
Forklifts sit abandoned, frozen mid-task.
Tarps drape over crates stacked into makeshift walls, each one stamped with the HL logo.
Horizon Logistics.
Their empire lay out across the floor like a confession.
Two guards stand near the service lift—one leaning on a pallet jack, the other scrolling his phone like he’s bored out of his mind. Perfect. Idiots make the easiest corpses.
I raise my silencer.
Emerson mirrors me.
Rowan angles slightly, ready to pounce if either man twitches wrong.
Two muffled shots.
Two bodies dropping like sacks of meat.
Rowan is on them within seconds, hauling both bodies behind a stack of crates without breaking stride. Emerson kneels beside them, stripping their weapons clean and unclipping the walkies from their belts. He checks for IDs but comes up empty.
“Damn,” Emerson mutters, turning one over. “We should have grabbed a name first, so when their team calls for… I don’t know… Carl or Jerry we know which stiff they mean.”
I glance at him. “Add it to the list of things we’ll yell at Berk about for being here.”
Rowan snorts. “She’d say we should’ve cut their throats first and worried about names later.”
He’s not wrong.
We move deeper. Everything down here screams industry—conveyor belts, steel hooks, hydraulic platforms. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was an ordinary warehouse.
But I do know better. I see the drag marks on the floor.
The dark stains they didn’t clean. The heavy locks that reinforced every door.
The likelihood is that people were being held here.
Sold here.
Broken here.
My fists clench so hard the bones grind.
Rowan stops at one of the covered pallets, lifts the edge of a tarp. Inside are long crates packed with military-grade rifles, fresh from shipment.
“This is where they run the show,” he murmurs. “Right under everyone’s nose.”
“Not for much longer,” I growl.
We sweep the basement corner to corner. No movement. No guards left breathing. But upstairs is another story. Multiple stairwells. Multiple entry points. And we know Dean is smart enough to keep heavy protection between him and anyone trying to reach him.
We fall into silence, crouched behind a stack of shipping crates, waiting for the next scheduled radio check-in. If the guards don’t respond, alarms go off. We lose the advantage.
Emerson watches the stolen walkie like it holds his pulse. “Should be any minute.”
The warehouse hums around us. Distant footsteps echo on the ceiling above. Something metallic clatters far off in another area. My nerves are steel wires stretched too tight.
Rowan leans in, voice barely a breath. “She’s here. I feel it.”
He doesn’t mean it in some psychic sense. He means he knows her—because we all do. Her fury. Her brilliance. Her recklessness. Her love.
If she’s planning, we’ll find blood.
If she’s fighting, we’ll find bodies.
And if she’s losing time… she’ll leave a trail of hell behind her until we reach her.
My jaw aches from clenching. “We’re getting them both out,” I whisper. “No matter what’s waiting upstairs.”
The walkie crackles.
“Checkpoint Six, report.”
When there’s too much of a delay without a response, Emerson doesn’t hesitate. He pitches his voice flat and bored. “Six, all clear.”
A beat.
Silence.
Then the radio clicks again.
“Copy.”
We exchange one look—one shared breath—and rise together.
“This is it,” I say, tightening my grip on my gun. “Once we hit the ground floor, it’s all noise and blood.”
Rowan cracks his neck, eyes burning. “Good. I’m tired of being quiet.”
Emerson shifts his stance; face carved from stone. “We clear everything between us and our girls. No hesitation.”
I nod once, lethal calm settling in my bones.
“From this point on,” I say, “anything that moves dies.”
Rowan grins, a mirror of my darkness.
Emerson inhales, slow and steady.
We move as one, ghosts in the dim stairwell, and together we climb toward hell.
My boots barely make a sound on the metal steps, and every muscle in my body vibrates with the need to tear through anyone standing between us, Kimber, and our girl.
Rowan’s ahead of me by half a step, Emerson at my back, all of us breathing in perfect sync.
When we reach the landing, Rowan holds up two fingers, then sweeps them forward.
Time to clear the bottom floor.
The moment we round the corner, the warehouse spreads out into a maze of crates, machinery, and shadows dense enough to swallow an army. The air reeks of oil and sweat, with a metallic bite beneath it—blood, most likely. The stench of their operation clings to every surface.
Rowan spots the first guard patrolling between two stacks of pallets.
He doesn’t hesitate. One hand clamps over the guy’s mouth while the other drives a blade up under his ribs.
The guard jerks once, then goes limp. Rowan lowers him silently, face expressionless, but I see the storm brewing in his eyes.
Four more are visible moving through the stacks, though that doesn’t mean they’re the only ones.
Emerson catches movement to our left and taps my arm. I nod and peel off, circling behind a conveyor belt. Two guards lean against a table, joking around, completely oblivious. Perfect. I fire twice with the suppressor, quick taps. Both drop instantly, dead before they hit the floor.
Behind me, Emerson whispers, “Two more. North wall.”
We converge there, Rowan sweeping wide while Em and I take the direct approach. One guard hears us, turns, and barely gets out a muttered “What the—” before Rowan is behind him, snapping his neck clean with a twist that echoes lightly off the concrete.
The last guard bolts for the stairwell door.
“No, you don’t,” I growl, sprinting after him.
I catch him by the collar just as his fingers brush the handle. He swings his elbow back and hits my ribs hard, but adrenaline eats the pain. I slam him into the wall and put a bullet through his temple. He slides down in a heap.
Silence floods the room again.
Five down.
We’re regrouping near the center of the floor when it happens.
A scream cuts through the air, shrill and raw and unmistakable.
Berk.
My blood freezes—then lights up all at once. The sound lands deep, feral, setting every instinct on fire. Rowan’s head snaps toward the stairs, his eyes blown wide as fear and fury fuse into a lethal rage.
Then it comes again. Pleas. Choked. Desperate.
“Please! Please stop!”
“No, don’t! I’ll do anything!”
“Please don’t kill me!”
Rowan surges forward immediately. I’m right behind him, and Emerson clamps a hand on my arm hard enough to bruise.
“Stop,” he hisses. “If you two charge in blind, you’ll get yourselves killed. Then she’s alone.”
“She’s alone right now!” I snarl back, trying to shake him off.
“And she won’t survive long if we’re dead,” Emerson snaps, voice low and deadly serious. “We do this smart.”
Rowan grips the railing, shaking with restraint. “She’s screaming, Em.”
“I know,” he whispers. “Believe me, I fucking know. But sloppy gets us all killed.”
More noise spills down from the upper floor—heavy boots pounding, a door slamming hard enough to shudder the beams, someone barking orders. Then laughter.
That sound crawls up my spine and locks it solid.
Dean.
His voice is faint but unmistakable. Smug. Taunting. Like he’s standing right above us with his foot on Berk’s throat.
He knows. He fucking knows she’s hurting.
The walkie clipped to my vest crackles again, the familiar static spikes of a scheduled check-in. Emerson thumbs the button, pitching his voice low as he tries to mimic one of the dead guards. It’s useless. Too many of them have missed their calls.
“Unit nine, copy?” the voice on the other end demands.
Emerson tries anyway. “Copy.”
“Negative on that,” another voice snaps, overlapping fast. “We have multiple silent units. Report now. All units report!”
Rowan mutters a curse under his breath. “Shit.”
Then the words we all expected but still punch me straight in the spine.
“We have a breach.”
The building erupts into motion. Footsteps hammer across the ceiling. Door’s slam open. Shouts echo from one end to the other as they scramble to reposition, to guard high-value assets, to hide whatever filth they don’t want us to find.
We don’t have time. If they move the girls—or decide it’s easier to kill them before we reach the door—we lose everything.
“We need to get in there,” Emerson urges. “Now.”
We sweep through the rest of the ground floor with lethal efficiency. The basement and main floor are clear; there is no one left alive down here. That means every remaining piece of shit is on the second floor. Which means Kimber and Berk are too.
My chest tightens; the pressure is so sharp I struggle to breathe. And then—
Another scream.
Berk.
High, ripping, blood-curdling. It tears through the ceiling like a blade. I don’t think. I just move.